User:Miamiheat12/sandbox

The modern-day perception of both Zionism and nationalism is seen from a retrospective viewpoint in which the natural destiny of a nation is to live together in a nation-state. Yet in the late 19th century, especially amongst those who lived in multiethnic empires (which included the early originators and thinkers of Jewish Autonomism), an autonomist format was regarded as equally mainstream to the idea of complete sovereignty. Only after the Second World War and the atrocities of the Holocaust did the concept of nationhood and statehood become increasingly inseparable and form the context from which we view nationalism today. Before this however, both autonomism and the sovereignty implied with a nation-state were viewed with equal merit and in fact the two movements did not see themselves as fundamentally opposed to each other but complementary. Both Jewish autonomism and Zionism denounced assimilation yet one key difference is that Dubow saw the Jewish nation as having already exceeded the "territorial nation" and been elevated into a "spiritual nation" whereas the Zionists believed that the Jewish people required to once again become a territorial nation.